Professor Richard Pettigrew

The epistemology of uncertain beliefs; rational decisions; metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics.

My recent research has been mainly in formal epistemology. In recent papers, I have pursued a research programme that I call epistemic utility theory. The strategy is to appeal to the notion of purely epistemic value as well as to the techniques of rational choice theory to provide novel and purely epistemic justifications for a range of epistemic norms. So far, I have considered the norms of Probabilism, Conditionalization, Jeffrey Conditionalization, the Principle of Indifference, and the Principal Principle.

I have a second research interest in the philosophy of mathematics, where I defend a variety of anti-platonist positions, such as eliminativist structuralism and instrumental nominalism.